When Nick Clegg opposed a Bill for fair votes, he cut all political ties to an
illustrious predecessor, Lord John Russell

Lord John Russell was educated at Westminster School. Nick Clegg studied there, too. Russell was leader of the Whig, soon to be Liberal, Party in Parliament. Clegg leads the Liberals there, too. Russell at one stage served as Foreign Secretary in a government led by a liberal (Peelite) Tory. Clegg is in the Cabinet of a Liberal-Tory administration, too. He’s the “Deputy Prime Minister”.

Russell is probably most celebrated as the architect of one of the most important democratic reforms in the history of Britain: he introduced the first Reform Bill, sparking the succession of parliamentary debates, constitutional fights between Commons and Lords, mass petitions, riots and massacres, that ultimately led to the Great Reform Act of 1832.

The Act abolished the rotten boroughs – seats with only handfuls of electors – and introduced representation to growing urban centres such as Birmingham, which had previously gone without. The Reform Act was the first landmark on the road to universal suffrage: not just the idea that each citizen should have a vote, but that each citizen’s vote should have the same weight. That Britain’s electorate has the right to fair votes, in other words.

Here, the comparison with Mr Clegg breaks down, just a little. For Mr Clegg last week voted down a Bill for fair votes. He didn’t abstain: he and his party joined with Labour in order to make the votes of some of you count for much less than those elsewhere. He is comfortable with some seats being nearly twice the size of others. This isn’t a matter of psephological irrelevance: if your seat is half the size of mine, then my vote counts for twice as much as yours (a vote’s weight is the reciprocal of the number of electors). Wirral West has 55,000 voters. The Isle of Wight has 110,000. Count it any way you like: that’s not fair.

The Coalition Agreement, hitherto held up by Lib Dems as the guide to what they would support in this parliament, the document they viewed as a near-sacred text – sacred in the fundamentalist sense, not like a vicar on “Thought For The Day” (“How times change!”) – says, on page 27: “We will bring forward a Referendum Bill on electoral reform, which includes provision for the introduction of the Alternative Vote in the event of a positive result in the referendum, as well as for the creation of fewer and more equal sized constituencies [my emphasis].”

The Agreement was clear: in return for Conservative support for the AV referendum, which nearly every Tory viewed with horror, the Lib Dems would support equalisation of constituency sizes (and a modest reduction in the number of MPs). The Tories delivered; the Lib Dems have reneged.

Mr Clegg has sought to link this betrayal with the failure of the Government to achieve the passage of his (dreadful) reform plans for the House of Lords. Does he think we are suddenly illiterate, and have lost the ability to read his precious Agreement? Still on page 27: “We will establish a committee to bring forward proposals for a wholly or mainly elected upper chamber on the basis of proportional representation.”

The Government did allow Mr Clegg to propose Lords reforms. It’s putting it kindly to say that they were laughed down. But that issue was never linked with equalisation of Commons seat sizes.

Why does this matter? For at least three reasons. The first is obvious, recountable by any eye-rolling student: you can’t trust a word Nick Clegg says. The second is tribal, which doesn’t undermine its significance: the distribution of electors to seats is so unfair (and will become worse) that it neatly provides an inbuilt advantage to the Labour Party. Tories require a national lead of 7 per cent in order to achieve a majority in Parliament.

But the most important reason is fairness. Unequal seat sizes implies unequal votes, as we’ve seen. A direct analogy with the grotesque inequalities supported by Mr Clegg is one where each seat is the same size, but some seats get an extra MP.

The ludicrous point is that campaigning for fair votes was more or less the Liberal raison d’être for decades: it was their name for proportional representation. I’m not a supporter of PR for first-principle statistical reasons, but it was correct to allow the Liberals, finally, to test the popularity of such a system, if only to stop them banging on about it. Their referendum failed, dismally, and AV was soundly rejected.

Mr Clegg now gives the impression of believing that we – Britain – voted the wrong way, and so he punishes us, by letting rotten boroughs creep back on to the map, the very boroughs his eminent – and truly liberal – predecessor helped to abolish, 181 years ago. How rotten is that?

As rotten as being the man who said this: “It was wrong that in the mandate given to people who are representing the public, somehow your vote is worth more in one place than it is in others.”

That was Mr Clegg, speaking to a House of Lords committee, in October 2010.